AN INTERMEZZO between posts 038 and 039
a story about the place that rewinds time
I am inviting you all back to the city Split, to the National Theatre, to see Diocletian, an opera which none of us has seen before. The official HNK www site summarises how this performance “in four acts and nine scenes, composed in 1964 by Ivo Tijardović to a libretto by Branko Radica, is a monumental and still unperformed musical-theatrical work that depicts the life of the Roman emperor Diocletian. Tijardović's historical spectacle will faithfully bring Diocletian to life in the intimate circle of his family and co-rulers. Written in the style of French classical opera, the opera revives the historical and legendary foundations of the city of Split through a rich spectrum of dramatic and emotional situations: from political intrigues to family conflicts.” For urbophilia purpose, that scarce summary is sufficient. This performance deserves attention and close analysis. If interested, you can find more in a detailed review by Magdalena Mrčela at Dalmatia Today pages; if needed, Google Translate can help)
_ _ _ I am inviting you to focus at only one intriguing and inspirational aspect in design of that opera, and the way in which it engages the viewers/listeners . . . my use of the term design is deliberate, pointing at an aspiration of the creative team to both measure, weight (as in Latin libra) and to liberate the thought (triggered by the performance) . . . as in design
_ _ _ the first eight scenes tell a remarkable story of Diocletian’s life in complex yet clear way, which the reviewer praises as director Ivan Leo Lemo’s concept of theatrical box. That has worked very well, but here I want to point at another creative act, a veritable design decision in the art of theatre, a brave stroke which, somewhat paradoxically, made this event genuinely of this place, by making it authentically not of this time
_ _ _ that idea which makes all the difference was a decision to take the audience, all spectators from the cushioned theatre out, to walk, escorted by the group of “Roman soldiers” to Peristil, the very place where actual drama unfolded 1709 years ago . . . almost at midnight (as the tourists were blissfully sleeping, or still hanging out, dead drunk) we were taken through the streets of Split
_ _ _ while the theatre box, as theatres do, made us transported in time, here we all were out, walking dark urban spaces of Split, to and through Diocletian’s original, still majestic Porta Aurea, along the remnants of Cardo, with every step reaching back in time flanked by the legionaries, to majestic Peristil, only to see Dioklecijan standing . . . precisely where real Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus once stood, stood the Emperor who was about to die, again
_ _ _ those eight, well staged and well performed segments of interior story-telling were succeeded by an immersion in true, concrete place, the place with power to rewind time, making us (making me) reach a (kind of) split catharsis, beyond theatre, beyond time, beyond my own long-standing fascination (remember the imperial-sized stones, from post 038!) with that very place, with columns sent from all provinces of the Empire to please and placate their sometimes moody and dangerous absolute ruler, with his 3,000 years old Thutmose III Sphinx (one of the original twelve, they say . . . the one which I loved to ride) . . . we were walking through Split which is not a regular everyday Split, to Peristil which is not (although – it is) Diocletian’s Peristil, to see Diocletian, who may not be that Diocletian (but who nevertheless is Diocletian), to see him (still) standing, agonising in the same spot as he was likely doing, there, in that very spot 1709 years ago
_ _ _ this event took us all, but each of us individually in, together, yet alone, silent, in our personal thoughts to a special place that has just rewound time, for us, in us, in that moment, for a moment (to remember) . . . like in Möbius strips or Klein bottles where the outside is also the inside, as Žižek in The Parallax View argues here the “reality itself is constituted in the perceptual disconnect between its realist and transcendental dimensions”
_ _ _ after eight acts of being in, and looking at Dioklecijan in the box, a walk to the Peristil crescendo was a momentous time/space experience which demanded, and during which we all achieved – the impossible
_ _ _ a single design gesture (as simple, as brave as good design gestures tend to be), executed in 1:1 scale, took us off balance, out to these real spaces which remember the millennia, and – we entered the past, the past entered us . . . that single, simple yet fascinating scenographic act, by both reducing and expanding a single historic (f)act was reinterpreted, as a story repeating its own self
[_ _ _ a story, a history, stories, histories . . . just across this sea which connects, la storia means both history and story, (f)actual or invented _ _ _]
